Customer Reviews

Lost Boys: Library Edition

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Okay.
This is not typical Card.
Those of you looking for science fiction might be disappointed.
But I cannot let this title linger at such a low rating.
I thought the book was one of the most sympathetic and emotionally thrilling portrayal of a family's loss of their little boy. (I suspect that it is somewhat autobiographical although I have no was of knowing this.)
I am not a Mormon, so the daily details of the main characters life were interesting to me. It is dated in the sense that it takes place in the early days of computers (which I found fascinating.)
I found the characters believable, and as always Card's dialogue is top-notch. It's a bit slow going at the top, but the payoff is worth it.
It's not a page turner, but sneaks up slowly on you. The story provides a delightfully creepy hair raising emotional twist towards the end, and I found it throughly satisfying. I read both the hardcopy and listened to Rudnicki's reading. I found them both excellent.
But, no, it's not Enderama.
If you'd like a family story (and are not offended by religion) with a high dose of creepy otherworldliness, read it. Or listen to it. There's a reason Rudnicki's performance won an Audie Award in 2005 for best horror/thriller.
I guess if you love Ender, you may be sad not to find him here: but you will find Card's talent as a character/thriller writer in full swing. I always think it's somewhat ungrateful of fans to be so harsh when a favorite writer tries something new. I think it's okay for a writer to change-it-up sometimes.
I believe it works here.
I also believe it works in Card's Alvin Maker series. Also, brilliant in my book. And again, very non-Ender.

I wouldn't recommend listening to this book in the audio version. This is not the fault of the reader, Stefan Rudnicki, who does a good job of creating different voices for the characters, and always seems to know the right words to emphasize. But author Orson Scott Card loves to digress at length about various topics, and with an audiobook, it's hard to skim over the things you aren't interested in. If you want to know about programming video games for the Commodore 64, everyday rituals of modern Mormons, or the etymology of the word "octopus", you'll get that information here, but it's a rare reader who will be interested in all these topics. The book is advertised on the back as a thriller in the style of Stephen King, but Card is not great at building suspense or momentum--most of the story has to do with the quotidian existance of the two main characters, Step and DeAnne, and Card tends to get caught up in that, to the point where much of the book is rather boring. It's more of a vehicle for Card's personal philosophy--about child-rearing, psychiatry, dealing with bothersome people, and debunking myths about Mormonism--than a regular novel. I believe he was aiming to create a portrait of a normal existence, with dark elements underneath that would bubble up at the proper time, but it seemed as though he actually forgot about the dark elements much of the time, in his zeal to instruct the reader. When the suspenseful parts of the story finally kick in, they're mostly predictable.

I had a lot of quibbles with the way some of the characters in the story were drawn, and with the very detailed talk between them, but I did like Step and DeAnne's children. They seemed like individuals, rather than a collective group of "kids". This definitely helps with the parts of the story that do work.

I was drawn to this book because of Enders Game (like most people who read his stuff), but this was BORING, tedious Mormon propaganda. At points it feels like he was getting paid by the numbers of pages he wrote, and, he figured that since he is the author of the highly popular "Enders Game" he has the license to subject his readers (listeners) to his views on Mormonism, while, ironically enough, MIScharacterizing non-Mormon "religion".

This is the first time I've understood when people have said that characters in books can be caricatures rather than characters. The people in this book are most definitely caricatures. Real people do not act as melodramatic and over the top as his characters do.

I 100% agree with previous poster about it being especially difficult to LISTEN to this book. I got to the point where I simply skipped whole chapters and found out I hadn't missed anything.

Very Very disappointed.